Saturday, January 23, 2010

On the 21st the Supreme Court augustly declared that limitations on how much money corporations can give to campaigns is an infringement of their 'free speech' rights. I'm putting free speech in quotes because it's absurd to believe that businesses have rights like human beings, especially that of free speech. What business has been prosecuted on obscenity charges? What business has had their 'speech' censored due to political concerns, I mean in the sense that actual people have their speech censored not in the sense that the Supreme Court made up on Thursday? Now there's zero oversight on how much corporations can give, meaning that they can buy and sell candidates with freedom, and that no matter who is running they now have to genuflect to the corporate interests that can defund them if they fall out of line.

All of this demonstrates that the Supreme Court has too much power in American society. We've seen how the Senate has too much power as well in relation to health care. Our system is broken and it will take fundamental change to fix. The Constitution is in certain respects outdated. But, as Bob Black says, the Constitution is the white man's ghost dance, meaning that people with no idea what the Constitution is about clutch it like a talisman in the hope that it will protect them. Other countries have had fundamental reform of foundational documents and they haven't collapsed.